From the No-Surprise Department: Viewers declare Sunday's fiasco more interesting than overseas war

Although Britney's disastrous performance last Sunday at the Video Music Awards emerged as an unavoidable news headline, the lumbering lip-syncher's gag-inducing antics managed to cull a huge uptick in ratings - 6.40, or nearly 7.1 million viewers, according to a CNN.com report. The 23% increase over last year all but gave MTV a viewership choke hold over other Sunday Night primetime TV contenders, owing to MTV's announced promise not to reair the 2007 VMAs after the initial broadcast. (By the by, this might not be entirely true — my Comcast onscreen guide shows a reairing on September 17; by then, perhaps MTV is praying viewers won't remember that pledge.)

But you can't deny the majority of those 23% were the same sort of Nosy Nelsons who would deliberately swerve their cars to the lane closest to a highway car crash just a catch a glimpse of any corpses being untangled from the wreckage. And yes, Britney's cringe-worthy, sucktastic waddling does serve as a valid comparison, especially during live TV.

It's no surprise far more relevant telecasts deserved recognition over the VMA's, but the program I have in mind boasts a more recurring downswing in ratings. I'm talking, of course, about the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, whose ailing viewership didn't prevent CBS from shipping the intrepid former Today Show anchor off to Iraq and Syria to earmark the one-year anniversary of Katie joining the nightly news war. It's also a move no other broadcasters parroted, in part to supply viewers firsthand accounts of the battlefield days before U.S. Army General David Petraeus issued his Congressional report on the current military surge.

Anyway, ratings dragged for CBS Evening News despite Katie Couric's insightful overseas field reporting. The telecast scored just 5.5. million viewers on average last week, according to a Neilson Media Research report.

Now, I watched most of those broadcasts, and happen to remember Katie interviewing a few Iraqi families about how secure they felt under U.S. insurgency, not to mention all those breathtaking shots of a Baghdad marketplace before and after it was bombed. There were many spine-tingling reports, yet apparently it wasn't enough appeal to reign in CBS' seemingly lost demographics.

And why not? Well, evidently the horrendous catastrophe in Iraq bears no match to the homespun disastrous meltdown that plagued our televisions on Sunday night. What's more awe-inspiring: fistfuls of grenades wreaking havoc 4,000 miles away or the explosive equivalent of a tragedy in Las Vegas?

According to America, it was the latter.